Oakworth Homes

The Challenge

Oakworth Homes with with architects, designers and builders to provide timber frames and other parts for housebuilding. They had been struggling with their “old-school” website for a number of years. Built in a previous generation the site relied on Flash, was not mobile-friendly and had to be updated by the developer. The site’s performance on search engines was also suffering from its outdatedness and lack of fresh content.

The website was causing confusion because Oakworth had rebranded but had been unable to update the look of the old site to match their new focus on dealing with the public as well as trade.

What We Did

We came up with a number of suggestions, the main being that we use WordPress as the content management system. Despite WordPress’ merits (which are discussed all over this site) Oakworth’s marketing manager was already familiar with the system and so could take over the updating of the site easily.

The look and feel of the site had to mirror Oakworth’s brand which is clean and precise but also has a natural feel. Oakworth use sustainable, natural materials but are also a precision, standards-led engineering company so the look of the site needed to show both, whilst being attractive to housebuilding contractors and architects down to single customers building their own home.

Oakworth has a story and heritage so we made sure there was an area on the site for the founder, John Capper, to tell that story.

Other suggestions we made were:

Testimonials to show the full story of an Oakworth build.

An inspiration gallery for visitors looking to build their own home.

Full descriptions of all products and services which could be easily updated.

A News and Events section which can detail recent projects and publicise Oakworth’s many appearances at trade shows and award wins.

Pull social media efforts together.

Replace illustrations and computer simulations with real photographs.

The bespoke WordPress theme we built allowed several different page layouts which could be selected to give different emphasis on content – some have full-page background images, some slideshows and some with a solid colour. The overall layout is simple and clean, letting the content speak for itself.

It was important that all images of products and processes should show the customer exactly what they might be purchasing, so we did a photoshoot at the company’s headquarters in Sheffield. This created a large library of images which can be used in rotation on the site to keep it fresh.

The Result

Oakworth now have a website they can update at will. Whereas before, the website had been left to languish because of the difficulties in updating it, it is now kept fresh and has become the main marketing tool for the company.